OEMs and carriers often put "their" (the Facebook app bundled on some Samsung phones can't be deleted, only disabled) apps on the system side of the fence...
"Given Google’s dominance in search and browsers and the popularity of its many web services, Pichai’s warning looks more like a bluff to court popular opinion than a genuine threat that Android will no longer be free."
I wish these bloggers would keep their biases and unsubstantiated commentary to themselves.
This fine is an assault on open source, the fact linux didn't attain mainstream appeal on the desktop was largely due to the lack of condition and harmonization across distros.
In any other context fining an open source project for antitrust violations is absurd.
I don't see how telling Google not to force itself as the default preinstalled option on phones is an "assault on open source".
> the fact the linux didn't attaint mainstream appeal on the desktop was largely due to the lack of condition and harmonization across distros
Not sure what "condition and harmonization is", but if you mean the poor UI for normal people, then yes. I don't see the relevance of this to Google forcing itself onto people's phones.
> and the EU wants to doom android to the same fate.
It was literally a few days ago when I was wondering to myself how people were cool with Google search etc. coming preinstalled. I had no idea the EU was looking into this. As a result I don't have any reason to believe their goal is anything but fair competition.
Considering the cause of the fine is all of the non-open source bits Google adds on, I don't see how one can make a statement like that with a straight face.
"In any other context fining an open source project for antitrust violations is absurd."
They didn't fine the Android Open Source Project. They fined Google.
They are not fining an open source project. They are fining a company making bad rules about what others are allowed to do with said open source project, e.g. by forcing them to choose between using Google stuff everywhere or nowhere in their devices.
Yes, and if they sell AOSP-based devices they then can not sell any other device with the Google components.
Or sell a device using only some of the things Google wants to make mandatory, but replacing others with their own.
That way they keep AOSP-based products on the fringe, since only niche manufacturers can afford to make them, and stop manufacturers trying to make/integrate better replacements for Google services. That's anti-competitive, that's the problem.
Why it is assault on open source?
The problem is that Google bundles it's Chrome and search apps (which are not open source) together with android that is later installed on devices made my others.
At least that what I see in the article.
AOSP's position is nothing like that of Linux. For years now it's been held hostage by a mega-corporation that doesn't really want it to be open-source any more. Google didn't buy and build Android and then make it free out of idealism, they did it so Apple couldn't become a monopoly and lock Google search out of mobile. Now they've more than accomplished that, and if they had their way it would already be proprietary.
Probably what Pichai is talking about is charging a fee for Google Play Services, not AOSP. Although if they did decide to proprietize all future development work on AOSP, it would be interesting to see how the community would respond. It's possible we'd see a major fork and a revitalization of community work a la Linux, instead of the little garage forks we mostly have today.
Google is already well in the process of making everything they can proprietary. Browser, Calendar, Camera, Dialer, Gallery, Music Player, SMS and probably more - all left to basically bitrot in AOSP while Google pushes proprietary replacements as part of the gapps bundle loaded onto OEM phones.
The core of Android may be open source, but between so many API's being shoved into Google Play Services and AOSP apps being all but abandoned the writing is on the wall.
Exactly. They actually go one step further than that with the Google Services API's. Things like notifications and location can now go through the proprietary API's instead of the system ones, with special perks. This means that if you don't have Google Services, then even if you get your hands on a third-party APK without using the Play Store (hard enough as it is), things will sometimes just randomly break because API's are missing.
Android is the very opposition of Free Software. Google took the Linux Kernel, modified it, added some proprietary bits, and they're doing what they can to replace open components with their own proprietary versions, making a really open version of Android hardly usable and extremely difficult to build.
Charging manufacturers for using the operating system you built is a healthy business practice. "Giving it away" and building in dozens of tracking mechanisms is hardly ethical.
I mean... those profits come from breaking the law. So I guess yes, technically you're right.
EDIT: I don't understand, how can anyone be against this? Doesn't every good person wish that all people and companies would behave according to the law? Did you vote for Trump?
You need to understand that a high (but not majority by any stretch) percentage of Americans will always take the side of a corporation over consumers no matter what.
It’s a weird and uniquely American thing.
One of the stranger things I’ve found after moving here from Australia (which has a very strong pro-consumer government agency called the ACCC which is non-partisan).
You tell me. It certainly appears that the EU spares no resources at seeking and investigating US corporations and certainly they have no qualm in sticking them with record fines.
Yes. They've been rather soft on VW, who got a pat on the back, just like US bankers did after the subprime mortgage crisis. I'm glad the US took a had stance against VW.
Which ones and for what amounts? Microsoft, Google, Qualcomm were fined more than $1b so far. All of them are US comapanies. Scania was fined €880m for price fixing.
Wholeheartedly agree here - definite undercurrent of protectionism in these highly publicized cases against US firms. Although I'm not sure how long the EU will be around in its current incarnation. It seems to be one more economic downturn away from serious trouble.
I'd like a statistic for that. To me that sounds like a classic observation bias. Just like germans frequently complain how unfairly bad the US gov treats VW or Deutsche Bank. Something i also haven't seen objective info for or against.
It's always surprising how much comments and postings in these parts are vehemently in opposition to data being usefully incorporated into these apps and services, I remember a recent post about how Google's passive on device music identification worked on the Pixel 2 which turned hostel.
I understand that certain types of people are attracted to certain topics but it's still somewhat jarring when in a technology discussion board there is this amount of anti tech sentiment.
This feature is useful, it puts that data gathered to a good use, and it's upfront about it, if you don't like it just swipe the notification away.
Don't be fooled, the iPhone is gathering the same type of data it just only snitches on non system apps doing so in the background. Not to mention that it looks like they don't put that data to good use which as far as I'm concerned is the greater sin.
I think the article primarily addresses the tone-deaf way in which Google addresses the user, not so much the practice of gathering data and providing useful suggestions to the user "like magic", which does indeed have it's benefits.
There's an implied deal that the user will provide their data to Google so they may profit from it, and in return they will provide you with a service free-of-charge. The article, and some anecdotes here in the comments, indicate that Google can be a little needy and tone-deaf in prompting the user to provide them with even MORE data, at times. Instead of passively collecting data, they appear to actively prompt the user to feed their machine, which is very annoying and creepy in the author's opinion.
> I'm of the persuasion that they can rank and display the results however they please, it's their site after all, so it's a non issue either way.
Of course they can legally do it, and we're not judges debating that.
There's a difference between what they are allowed to do legally, and what they can do that keep me coming back as a user. This is legal, but it makes me use DuckDuckGo instead.
I wonder how Google manages the network topology for testing this so that the fact that AMP is served from a Google-local cache does not give it a speed advantage to Google's speed-testing bot beyond any it may have in typical, outside of Google, use.
They could've made an open standard that not only websites but other search engines could implement as well, but then again why would they do that? They'd lose a competitive advantage.
I think AMP is very deliberately locked in to google.
> It's funny how no one was up in arms when facebook (the leading source of publisher traffic) did their version of accelerated pages.
Hmm, I guess it depends where you look. I saw quite a LOT of people upset by it. Many participated because they felt like they had to in order to get views.
Who cares about facebook? This is the web! AMP threatens to force even small blogs to convert from open web to walled garden where Google decides what will be published and what will get blocked.
Why convert? I find it pretty easy keeping an amp and non-amp version on the same codebase. Just a few switches what's activated where. And many of the restrictions (images with set sizes, no style tags, no use of !important) make a lot of sense for any page. And going once through Bootstrap CSS and deleting everything you don't need also helps improving user experience.
If anything, supporting AMP has accelerated my non-AMP pages a lot.
There was a lot more and a lot worse than that, as you'll see if you read the post that's now pointed to above. See my top comment for explanation of the change.
> I'm not totally okay with blackballing brilliant people for touching someone's thigh.
Are you saying you'd be fine with it if they weren't brilliant? Or that touching the thigh of a junior in your organization, who you are also hitting on in texts, should just be OK in general, for both brilliant and non-brilliant managers?
I mean either way I think you were born a few decades too late, but for clarity's sake, I'm curious what you're getting at.
I'm not okay with letting brilliant people be harassed. Even from a purely cost/benefit standpoint, allowing a toxic environment will drive out more talent than we'd lose by eliminating the harassers.
Agreed, but at the same time I think this matter shouldn't be broadcast publicly until the investigation finishes. If he did do what he said, then the investigation should confirm it, and then he should get blackballed for harassment because it's not ok.
But first step should be proving it, not blackballing someone because of allegations. I think we can all agree that removing someone who harassed is a good thing, while removing someone who is only alleged to have harassed is a bad thing. And that distinction probably needs to be made by someone qualified, not an activist or the general public.
> Agreed, but at the same time I think this matter shouldn't be broadcast publicly until the investigation finishes.
As we've seen over and over, very often there's no investigation unless the matter is broadcast publicly. So much easier to sweep things under the rug.
Still, maybe we should publicize that allegations have occurred without specifying against who? And making it public if an organisation refuses to investigate. That should give the same public result without the need to attack someone who is only alleged.
Did we read the same article? More than touching her thigh, the accusation described a prolonged unreciprocated infatuation with her. That would surely make me uncomfortable in my workplace.
A study this year by Stone Temple, a prominent analyst of the industry, showed Google’s search engine answered 74.3% of 5,000 questions, and on those answers it had a 97.4% accuracy rate. Both percentages are higher than services from Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corp.
Alternative WSJ:
Let's bury that tidbit under the fold while we nitpick and highlight edge cases in a constantly improving system.
We should also emphasising how integral google's search is to the health of society and civilization because we are mandated by management and ownership to produce anti-google PR and provide a steady supply of ammunition to its critics.
That's absolutely the wrong way to go about looking at it. Not all facts are of equal importance. 97 correct facts about, say, gardening, and three incorrect facts about first aid is not a successful system.
If Google is presenting the tool as a canonical source of truth, it needs to be right 100% of the time. In fact, being right 97.4% of the time is worse in many ways, as it lulls people into a false sense of security about how much they can trust the system. Get 97/100 obvious answers correct, then give someone wildly inappropriate advice when they ask something more "off piste".
And let's not delude ourselves here, Google isn't doing this out of an altrustic desire to help people. They're making sure fewer people leave google.com, in the process starving the very sites they're getting information from of revenue. That should worry all of us.
> we are mandated by management and ownership to produce anti-google PR and provide a steady supply of ammunition to its critics.
This feels like an absurd criticism. Couldn't it apply to absolutely every negative thing written about Google, ever? Why should Google be immune from criticism?
>If Google is presenting the tool as a canonical source of truth, it needs to be right 100% of the time.
Should we burn all the dictionaries and encyclopaedias because they aren't perfectly accurate? Textbooks don't have a black-box warning on the front page saying "The accuracy of this book cannot be guaranteed. Please verify any facts stated before storing them in your long-term memory or using them for any purpose"?
"Truth" is an inherently messy concept. The very best curated sources and human experts are frequently fallible. If you assume that Google (or any other source) is infallibly accurate, then the problem lies with your education, not the source.
Google is not an encyclopedia or a dictionary, though. Encyclopedias are editorially curated products where each entry is researched and chosen very deliberately. The answers Google provides are picked by an algorithm and have nowhere near the level of oversight that dictionaries and encyclopedias do.
> "Truth" is an inherently messy concept. The very best curated sources and human experts are frequently fallible.
Here, we can agree. My objection is to Google presenting their tool as if it does provide one true answer to your question.
"The problem lies in your education" is a fantastic way of absolving responsibility. What if people's education about tech is in fact exactly the problem? Do we shrug our shoulders and say "well, they should all know better" or do we proactively try to make the situation better?
How many Wikipedia articles are one sentence saying "this is the answer"? None. If anything they're padded out to excess, detailing the different perspectives about any particular topic, complete with referencing and footnotes.
I was going to take issue with you're "this is the answer" description but sure enough, on the featured snipped "About this result", Google interchanges the word "answer" and "result" pretty arbitrarily:
When a user asks a question in Google Search, we might show a search result in a special featured snippet block at the top of the search results page. This featured snippet block includes a summary of the answer, extracted from a webpage, plus a link to the page, the page title and URL...
Wikipedia came to mind when this topic of 100% accuracy came up, a metric people seriously think Google needs to hit in order to not cause mass hysteria, it seems. Wikipedia is constantly updated because the information is curated by humans. Humans have the ability to lie, omit facts based on beliefs, fudge numbers to paint a specific narrative, and so many more egregious examples of ways to mislead those who would use the resource. I understand having high expectations for things but just like with anything fact based there needs to be a level of skepticism and self policing of what we allow to become things we know to be true based on our own acknowledgement.
This is something I feel long time internet users have built up a tolerance to and an eye for. Of course I understand wanting to hit that 100% metric for those unfamiliar with the concept of others steering folks in the wrong direction purposefully but how can we honestly draw a defined line in the sand to gauge a systems usefulness? Especially when that system's data is based on the concept of human knowledge, an ever changing, rapidly developing, and hotly contested part of the human experience?
If an encyclopedia said the Earth is 6000 years old, and starts "Evolutionists fallaciously think that billions of years of time makes particles-to-people evolution possible", as the top hit when Googling "how old is the Earth" says, then yes, throw out that encyclopedia.
Being fallible is one thing, but Google's algorithm is misrepresenting scientific belief because an extremist group are the only ones who will pay for SEO about the subject. If Google wants to be the world's authoritative source of knowledge, they're gonna need a more advanced system where SEO spammers can't buy the truth, otherwise all we have are modern day iterations on Phillip Morris' research showing no link between lung cancer and cigarettes for decades.
> Textbooks don't have a black-box warning on the front page saying "The accuracy of this book cannot be guaranteed. Please verify any facts stated before storing them in your long-term memory or using them for any purpose"?
I just checked a 2004 medical textbok I had nearby (don't ask). YES, they do have such disclaimers, and they're worded even better than you put it.
A few levels up, medical facts were the example used for needing disclaimers. The point is that Google isn't putting up disclaimers even where they should.
> ...97 correct facts about, say, gardening, and three incorrect facts about first aid is not a successful system...
General information sources that include but aren't specifically focussed on medical information don't usually have disclaimers on the medical information (e.g., encyclopedias don't have disclaimers on entries that happen to concern medical information, while medical textbooks do).
And that’s a ridiculous standard because there is no such thing as 100% when talking about knowledge. Humans and experts wouldn’t agree 100% of the time so it’s impossible for computers to get there.
So why create a feature that pretends such a thing is possible, and promote it as heavily as Google does?
In many ways, "I'm feeling lucky" was a great middle ground - by clicking it you're implictly saying "I know this might not actually be what I'm looking for, but I'm willing to compromise". Google has taken that compromise and stuck it at the top of the search results page.
For profit corporations require that the senior employees they hire for impossibly high paychecks are constantly providing benefits that can be brought up in quarterly board meetings. This means taking an already functional product and making changes to it -- any change -- that can be spun as being a positive improvement worthy of a promotion.
Google Search is already where it should be. Yet Google Search employs thousands of incredibly expensive engineers. Something has to be done, and that "something" is rarely going to be good, and almost guaranteed to be something nobody actually wanted.
Is your argument "Google should not be allowed to do anything if their algorithms aren't 100% flawless and perfect"? I really am failing to understand your viewpoint.
No, my argument is "Google should not present results as if they are an absolute answer when they are not capable of knowing whether that is true".
It's pretty simple: a list of search results does not imply certainty. Injecting a single "answer" does. As I mentioned elsewhere, it's as if they have decided that the "I'm feeling lucky" button should apply to everyone.
But is google even implying that the results are the absolute answer?
If I search for "how tall is tom cruise" and it gives me a number. It doesn't say that number is an absolute answer, it doesn't say that it's verified, it just shows the number.
I personally don't see that as any different than if it returned a few websites, all of which say the same thing when I go to them. In all cases it's "Google" giving me the answer (an evil google could just as easily return websites with false results on purpose), but the way it currently works, it gives me the answer faster and in a better format. And even if that answer isn't 100% factually correct or verified in any way, it's still the same quality I would have gotten from google in any other method.
If the answer is the same using both methods, wouldn't the only real solution to be "refuse to answer the question"?
in the case of unattributed information, i would think some edge cases risk lawsuits (libel or other things) or pr problems if the information is wrong.
imdb was sued for revealing a person's age; and while imdb won the case, a law in california was passed that dealt with the matter. what happens if google displays information about you that you feel is private (or some legal jurisdiction asserts is so)?
i noticed that "what should i do if bitten by a snake" does have attribution. however, it seems to me that the information is presented in a "this is the answer" way, ie as trustworthy and actionable... what happens if following whatever google suggests results in harm or death?
either way, i'm surprised google hasn't bothered to add couching language or some notional caveats. (even a "here's what we found:" seems reasonable distancing.)
I guess I fundamentally disagree that them providing an 'answer' is somehow unethical, unless there is some kind of verbiage on the feature that claims 100% accuracy that I am unaware of.
>This feels like an absurd criticism. Couldn't it apply to absolutely every negative thing written about Google, ever? Why should Google be immune from criticism?
I think this is more a direct attack on WSJ's questionable neutrality rather than a strong defense of Google's behavior.
I dug up the study by Stone Temple to see what kind of questions were asked (eg: are the questions really trivial or not) and they provide a few exampled in their write up. I am actually seriously impressed by how well those "personal assistants" work compared to what I would expect. Kudos to the engineers who built those things!
(Disclosure: I never worked on any of those, nor do I work for any of the companies making them)
If there was someone I knew who I could ask a question, with a 97% chance they were correct, I'd consider them to be a phenomenon, and an extremely valuable resource. For some definition of correct, I'd be happy to be 60% accurate.
Yeah but what if you got to choose between 2 people that knew the answer 50% of the time but one of the them enjoyed making up answers when they didn't know and the other just told you they didn't know?
This is not about "a grain of salt". Imagine you're a ten year old kid and you're looking for answers on some subject, say the Holocaust. What if all the "answers" you're getting are from far-right hate groups? How do you think that will affect that person?
Likewise, if you're looking for medical advice and you're getting nothing but anti-science woo, can we really be surprised that anti-vaxxers are becoming more numerous? These outbreaks of deadly, yet preventable diseases have serious fatal consequences for many.
"Grain of salt" means fuck all when people are dying from bad answers. You can't learn from your mistakes when you're dead.
At least Google could frame these with the idea of keeping a skeptical mind, but they should probably stop surfacing things as "the answer" and instead as "top search result".
I'm not sure why you feel the need to comment on how credulous I might be.
Anyway, the 97% is an impressive result, it just isn't so impressive as to be beyond criticism. My comment is a little over the top, in response to the other comment that sets the bar at effusive praise being the only proper analysis of the system.
There's no margin of error for the test they did, just potential sampling bias.
Given the 5000 questions they asked, the system will provide the wrong answer 2.6% of the time. Every time, until they improve it. There's a chance that they managed to ask the only 150 questions that it doesn't know the answer to, but not a very big one.
I agree -- given the sample space, there is not effective way to calculate the margin of error. Even so, I don't think that there are many examples of non-deterministic mechanisms that produce the correct answer 97% of the time.
A parser (assuming you are talking about a programming language parser) has the luxury of having highly structured and deterministic inputs, and to be able to refuse giving an "answer" if they are not.
Philosophically speaking, assuming there is always a single answer for any question and promoting a specific SINGLE answer for them is not only inaccurate and misleading, sometime it's WRONG! The world is complex, many questions will and should have multiple answers depending how you look at it.
Google used to be a place (when it was really new) where you would always find what you were looking for within the 10 first responses because of the power of it's "Pigeon Ranking". I'm not claiming 97.4% in all cases but really often "I Feel Lucky" would be the right answer. Slowly this got gamed by people that wanted to have their sites there and this magic disappeared.
I imagine these selected answers will either come for a dwindling amount of sources of "truth", turning Google in a sort of Yahoo! with lots of handpicked results or again these algorithms will be gamed and we get the same mess as Google turned into where it was constantly fighting new waves of spam.
Of course fines are a revenue source, the EU operates on multiyear fixed budged which they supplement with fines and tariffs.
The bulk of that wealth transfer is reliant on the coffers of US companies.